Mmm, I've never seen this, but I quickly understood that my box was seriously damaged, the access to my data was impossible; user in panic

After two days of trying to fix the issue I've been able to get back my disk intact; I know, I'm a pretty lucky folk.

First to all this "guide" worked for me and for my case; for what I've understood the problem was regarding something about EXT4 filesystem that was locking the access to the disk due to the unexpected shutdown (of course); Grub was ok, hardware disk was ok; I'm not so deep involved in the knowledge of the filesystem stuff, but I had the high suspect that the inode structure was denying the system to be mounted/accessed for some pending operations.

The damaged partition, in my case, was /dev/sda1.
Now I've tried to do an fsck:

Code:

sudo fsck -yv /dev/sda1

but

Code:

fsck: Device or resource busy while trying to open /dev/sda1
Filesystem mounted or opened exclusively by another program?

What? The disk was obviously not mounted (although I did an umount); no way, I was not able to do an fsck on that partition.

I've tried everything:

Create an image with dd and mount the image after an fsck (the image was unusable due to an arror in the filesystem)

Back-up the partition with PhotoRec (the files saved were really trivial)

Mount the disk as slave (the Ubuntu Rescue freezed trying to mount it)

I've was almost to give up and prepare myself to format the disk, when I came across this technical document (for EXT3) http://planet.admon.org/using-altern...to-check-ext3/
So I decided to try it as last resource (remove the first inode), based on consideration that all my data was already lost.

fsck: Device or resource busy while trying to open /dev/sda1
Filesystem mounted or opened exclusively by another program?

Damn! No way; but I was thinking that maybe a reboot (*) was needed.
(*) to reboot with Ubuntu Rescue I've used ALT+PrnScreen+r+e+i+s+u+b instead of normal reboot because the normal reboot was not working

Then I've launch fsck again:

Code:

sudo fsck -yv /dev/sda1

and now this time worked!
Fsck fix the filesystem errors; I've had not need to do a tune2fs as stated in the document reported above for the re-creation of the journalized filesystem.

Rebooted the machine with my disk and everything is all there.
Happy user.

------------------------------------------------yep ”short and long URL„http://yep.it/
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Re: HOWTO: recover lost partition after unexpected shutdown (Lucid)

Hi,
this guide it is for EXT4 filesystem where the first inode lock the access to the disk; be careful with the commands in this guide with a different filesystem (NTFS).

Afaik for NTFS there is a suite called ntfsprogs that should be included in Ubuntu Remix for helping your situation (type ntfs+tab on terminal for the command list below, in red maybe two useful commands for your situation, see always man pages):